On the weekend I took a trip to Canberra to visit the Art and Music library at the Australian National University through which I am undertaking a Masters in Art History and Curatorial Studies part time. Whist I was there I also had the chance to briefly visit the National Gallery of Australia. I was pleasantly surprised to find an exhibition that not only covered my favourite historical art movement but also my favourite medium, Printmaking.
The exhibition Robert Motherwell: At five in the afternoon, drew works from the National Gallery of Australia's collection and explored his development as a printmaker over a number of years.
The exhibition was split into a number of themes; Motherwell and Surrealism, Collage, Motherwell and the Workshop, and Experiments with Colour.
American born Motherwell (1915-1991) was a key figure in the development of Abstract Expressionism. While other artists associated with this style, like Jackson Pollock, considered the creation of 'painterly prints' impossible, Motherwell considered printmaking his 'mistress': a liberating activity characterised by spontaneous gestures and freshness of expression. He was bale to embrace etching and later lithography, harnessing these techniques for his own creativity.
As well as a master if gesture, Motherwell was a brilliant colourist. He felt an affinity with artists who had worked in the south of France, notably Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. He shared with them the experience of living in a landscape dominated by strong light and earth colours found in the California of his childhood, where 'edges are sharp' and 'shadows are black.'
For many years Motherwell confronted the 'endless challenge' of refining a gestural image in what because known as his Elegy series. In deference to the famed Spanish poet, Garcia Lorca, he called the first of these At five in the afternoon, a repeated refrain from Lorca's poem Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias, which tells of the death of a brave and noble matador. The abstract elegy image, imbued with the tragedy of death and Spanish history, was lost in translation for gallery-going New Yorkers who interpreted the title as a reference to the cocktail hour an late afternoon martinis.
Motherwell and Surrealism
I had come to New York in 1940, after a year in Paris. Though a number of coincidences, the first significant artists I knew professionally were Europeans in exile...
To replicate the experience of Parisian life in New York, emigres who had escaped the Nazi threat in Europe and who embraced tenets of Surrealism congregated at cafes, bookshops, and galleries, including Paggy Guggenheim's 'Art of the Century Gallery'. It was through Motherwell's association with them that he discovered theories of Surrealism. In response, he argued that the way forward for American art was to adopt techniques such as 'automatism' which lead to spontaneous gestures. For Motherwell:
The subject does not pre-exist. It emerges out of the interaction between the artist and the medium... and [this is] why its conclusion cannot be predetermined. When [one has] a predetermined conclusion, you have 'academic art' by definition... an artistic medium is not an inert object, or conversely a set of rules for composition, but a living collaboration, which not only reflects every nuance of one's being but which, in the moment in which one is 'lost', comes to one's aid.
Working on a larger scale than the Surrealists, Motherwell relied on their methods, using his 'automatic arm' to let his imagery flow onto his printing stone, plate, sheet of paper, or canvas.
Motherwell and the Workshop
Motherwell was first and foremost and Abstract Expressionist, however the emerging styles of Pop and Minimalism also informed his work. Inspired by the imagery of everyday life used by Pop artists, Motherwell began to incorporate elements such as cigarette packets into his compositions. master printer Ken Tyler enlarged Motherwell's collage components and printed them together with his gestural sweeps and splatters. The result was Bastos and the St Michael series, which mark a new scale and richer palette in Motherwell's printmaking.
The artist described Tyler as a 'one-man search and rescue squad - a printer of extraordinary capabilities and boundless energy'.Yet despite this, Motherwell sometimes found working in a print workshop daunting:
You arrive, say at ten o'clock and are introduced to everybody. There are five or six printers standing around, there are a couple of secretaries, there's usually a photographer - maybe a member of staff - and, in effect, you realise with a sinking heart that an enormous amount of time and money and organisation has been set aside in a definite timeslot for you to be a creative genius.
to solve this problem Motherwell and Tyler worked together in the relative quiet of Sunday afternoons, and the collaboration between artist and printer produced many remarkable prints.
Experiments with Colour
Initially Motherwell remained wary of embracing colour because for him black was the most resonant of colours:
I belong... to a family of 'black' painters and earth-colour painters in masses... which would include Manet and Goya and Matisse... there are certain works of Picasso that belong in that family too...
When he did venture away from the pigments of earth and light Motherwell worked with a limited palette, noting that his compositions could manage:
The blueness of blues, light and air and colour, walls, perspective and a general sense of the Mediterranean; with solitude, with intensities, placing, decisiveness, and ambiguities.
Motherwell became more infatuated with colour after Tyler added a paper mill to his workshop at Mount Kisco in upstate New York. The printer observed:
Motherwell seemed to want to work in colour and we were extremely anxious for him to do that, so we kept adding colour to the black and whites... The paper mill started to have some magical influence on him.
This is evident in the last works Motherwell made, which combine lithography and coloured pressed paper pulp, providing a richness and saturation of colour which the artist had not achieved before.
The exhibition Robert Motherwell: At five in the afternoon, drew works from the National Gallery of Australia's collection and explored his development as a printmaker over a number of years.
The exhibition was split into a number of themes; Motherwell and Surrealism, Collage, Motherwell and the Workshop, and Experiments with Colour.
American born Motherwell (1915-1991) was a key figure in the development of Abstract Expressionism. While other artists associated with this style, like Jackson Pollock, considered the creation of 'painterly prints' impossible, Motherwell considered printmaking his 'mistress': a liberating activity characterised by spontaneous gestures and freshness of expression. He was bale to embrace etching and later lithography, harnessing these techniques for his own creativity.
As well as a master if gesture, Motherwell was a brilliant colourist. He felt an affinity with artists who had worked in the south of France, notably Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. He shared with them the experience of living in a landscape dominated by strong light and earth colours found in the California of his childhood, where 'edges are sharp' and 'shadows are black.'
For many years Motherwell confronted the 'endless challenge' of refining a gestural image in what because known as his Elegy series. In deference to the famed Spanish poet, Garcia Lorca, he called the first of these At five in the afternoon, a repeated refrain from Lorca's poem Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias, which tells of the death of a brave and noble matador. The abstract elegy image, imbued with the tragedy of death and Spanish history, was lost in translation for gallery-going New Yorkers who interpreted the title as a reference to the cocktail hour an late afternoon martinis.
Motherwell and Surrealism
I had come to New York in 1940, after a year in Paris. Though a number of coincidences, the first significant artists I knew professionally were Europeans in exile...
To replicate the experience of Parisian life in New York, emigres who had escaped the Nazi threat in Europe and who embraced tenets of Surrealism congregated at cafes, bookshops, and galleries, including Paggy Guggenheim's 'Art of the Century Gallery'. It was through Motherwell's association with them that he discovered theories of Surrealism. In response, he argued that the way forward for American art was to adopt techniques such as 'automatism' which lead to spontaneous gestures. For Motherwell:
The subject does not pre-exist. It emerges out of the interaction between the artist and the medium... and [this is] why its conclusion cannot be predetermined. When [one has] a predetermined conclusion, you have 'academic art' by definition... an artistic medium is not an inert object, or conversely a set of rules for composition, but a living collaboration, which not only reflects every nuance of one's being but which, in the moment in which one is 'lost', comes to one's aid.
Working on a larger scale than the Surrealists, Motherwell relied on their methods, using his 'automatic arm' to let his imagery flow onto his printing stone, plate, sheet of paper, or canvas.
Motherwell and the Workshop
Motherwell was first and foremost and Abstract Expressionist, however the emerging styles of Pop and Minimalism also informed his work. Inspired by the imagery of everyday life used by Pop artists, Motherwell began to incorporate elements such as cigarette packets into his compositions. master printer Ken Tyler enlarged Motherwell's collage components and printed them together with his gestural sweeps and splatters. The result was Bastos and the St Michael series, which mark a new scale and richer palette in Motherwell's printmaking.
The artist described Tyler as a 'one-man search and rescue squad - a printer of extraordinary capabilities and boundless energy'.Yet despite this, Motherwell sometimes found working in a print workshop daunting:
You arrive, say at ten o'clock and are introduced to everybody. There are five or six printers standing around, there are a couple of secretaries, there's usually a photographer - maybe a member of staff - and, in effect, you realise with a sinking heart that an enormous amount of time and money and organisation has been set aside in a definite timeslot for you to be a creative genius.
to solve this problem Motherwell and Tyler worked together in the relative quiet of Sunday afternoons, and the collaboration between artist and printer produced many remarkable prints.
Experiments with Colour
Initially Motherwell remained wary of embracing colour because for him black was the most resonant of colours:
I belong... to a family of 'black' painters and earth-colour painters in masses... which would include Manet and Goya and Matisse... there are certain works of Picasso that belong in that family too...
When he did venture away from the pigments of earth and light Motherwell worked with a limited palette, noting that his compositions could manage:
The blueness of blues, light and air and colour, walls, perspective and a general sense of the Mediterranean; with solitude, with intensities, placing, decisiveness, and ambiguities.
Motherwell became more infatuated with colour after Tyler added a paper mill to his workshop at Mount Kisco in upstate New York. The printer observed:
Motherwell seemed to want to work in colour and we were extremely anxious for him to do that, so we kept adding colour to the black and whites... The paper mill started to have some magical influence on him.
This is evident in the last works Motherwell made, which combine lithography and coloured pressed paper pulp, providing a richness and saturation of colour which the artist had not achieved before.